Maslow's Hierarchy Be Damned

If you are serious about Climate Change and improving farmers' lives, pay attention to how the West and the Rest of the World perceive "development" differently.

Special thanks to Ramasubramanian and Sunita Narain for their ethics leadership which birthed this piece.

If you want to understand why Abraham Maslow was dead wrong about his “Hierarchy of Needs”, talk to an average Indian farmer, stuck in quicksand where agriculture is both a business and not a business. My Mentor friend Ramasubramanian recently quipped about it and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Ram makes an extremely poignant point - Why should he cross-subsidise our low-cost food without taking into account the real cost of food production?

Indian Culture Has Revered Farmers as 'Annadata' for Ages. Today, It Has sadly become the albatross hanging around their necks.

If you’ve studied organizational behaviour management in India or elsewhere, odds are that you would have heard of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s one of those post-truth meme constructs that refuses to disappear, no matter how much evidence you can marshall against this seemingly sensible construct.

Here is the funny part.

As Paul Millerd and Shane Safir do the important debunking honours, Maslow never proposed a pyramid and wasn’t sure if it was a hierarchy in the first place. It didn't come in any peer-reviewed psychology journal. It came in a management book from a business professor Keith Davis in 1957 and it looked like this.

And here is the worst part.

As was the norm during his times, he whitewashed his theory’s Blackfoot roots. As several scholars attest, he “borrowed generously” “from the Blackfoot people to refine his psychological theory on the hierarchy of needs”

By the time the pyramid became a viral meme, Professor Maslow was in dire straits and enjoyed the brief limelight he got and hoped that people would appreciate his other works.

Even though the theory is nonsensical that somehow sounds like some deep philosophical truth, there is something deeply attractive about the theory, perhaps because of its structural essence: Until lower-order needs are met, we don’t pay attention to higher-order needs.

But here is the thing.

If this theory were true, Indian farmers would have recognized that their lower-order physiological needs could never be met in their unprofitable cereal hamster-wheel model and would have quit agriculture long ago.

In fact, this was largely the rosy-tinted dream of Nobel laureate economist Arthur Lewis who predicated “development” on the strange idea that farmers have to “exit” agriculture to set in wheels the motion that drives the engines of “manufacturing” and “services”.

Here is a visual depiction which sums up the flawed common-man understanding of agriculture. Be Honest. Raise your hand if you think this image sums up your perception of agriculture in India. <Image Credits: Illustration: Chad Crowe>

If you look at the ground data, the reverse is happening.

Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS):

The farm sector's share of the employed labour force in India has shown an interesting trend:

• It declined from 64.6% in 1993-94 to a low of 42.5% in 2018-19

• However, it then rose to 45.6% in 2019-20 and 46.5% in 2020-21

• In 2023-24, it stood at 46.1%, still significantly higher than the pre-pandemic low (Source)

Development Intelligence Unit (DIU) Study

A recent study of over 6,000 marginal farmers found that:

• 84% of marginal farmers do not want to quit farming or sell their land

• Only 2.77% wanted to leave farming altogether

• 10.99% chose to reduce farming activities in due course

More people are returning to agriculture as they don’t see any other respectable pathway to a livelihood and survive on a portfolio of incomes while deriving a secondary ~30% income from cultivation.

As I’ve written before, battered by the higher-order forces of Climate Change and lower-order forces of existential livelihood concerns, Indian Agriculture is in the throes of a fundamental shift from Economies of scale to Economies of scope.

Orchestrating this shift is hard. Easier said than done.

If we are serious about helping Indian farmers navigate the painful transition from economies of scale to economies of scope, understanding how the West and the Rest of the World perceive "development" differently is critical.

Sunita Narain in her recent podcast conversation with Nate Hagens talked about this and this distinction was airdropped in full-blown intensity inside my thought processor.

In the Global North, “Development” is decoupled from “Environmentalism”.

In the Global South, “Environmentalism” is part of “Development”.

This distinction is mission-critical because folks in the Global South love to see “development” and “environmentalism” as separate compartments in their heads without realizing that environmentalism is about making development sustainable.

Because the Global North view loves to look at “Environmentalism” as a separate bucket from “development”, we often hear mimicry echoes of this view from the agribusiness leaders of the Global South.

Here is a classic example from RS Sodhi - President of the Indian Dairy Association, ex-Managing Director, AMUL from his presentation at the IDF conference.

As a helpful aid to critical thinking, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about "pedophrasty" as a form of argument where we invoke children as a prop-up to rationalize arguments and suspend scepticism.

Given that I am hearing this sentence repeatedly from R S Sodhi (He used the same slides in the earlier Dairy Tech Conclave I attended), I wonder if we should coin the phrase "esuriophrasty" where hunger and empty plates are shown as prop-up to rationalize arguments and suspend scepticism, creating a false binary between development and sustainability.

To be fair to RS Sodhi, he made this argument in the context of per capita emissions in which India stands at the bottom, challenging the Global North View of Methane and Climate Change.

Studying the complexity of Methane and Animal Nutrition teaches you powerful systems thinking lesson: What happens when you apply linear approaches to cyclical phenomena?

In 2024, Earth's average temperature crossed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Today, we cannot afford to create a false binary between development and sustainability.

Whether it is through climate tech or agritech, any agricultural technology cannot be sustainable if it is not affordable AND inclusive. That should be the litmus test in Global South through which we ought to evaluate our attempts to improve farmers’ lives through technology in an age of runaway Climate change.

What will emerge when we evaluate our latest agritech and climate tech developments from this lens? We will find out in 2025:)

So, what do you think?

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